OPINION: Against all odds, a small school in a big city is changing lives by focusing on emotions

“Schools routinely administer academic assessments to get a handle on what incoming students know, and how best to help them learn more. They should do the same for what’s going on inside a student’s heart, taking a lesson from “ the toughest prep school in America,” which Benedictine monks have run for more than 150 years in the heart of Newark, New Jersey. St. Benedict’s, now widely considered one of the most successful inner-city educational movements, provides a stellar example of how using simple emotional health intake forms can help educators reach troubled teens well before their problems ruin their academic records. After years of reporting on the school for my latest book, I realized that this modest approach, or some version of it, could work well beyond the walls of one small school. St. Benedict’s gives every entering student a customized assessment originally modeled after the Western Psychological Services’ “Problem Experiences Checklist” for adolescents, which is now out of print. The school updates its own form to reflect emerging issues, recently adding a question about the isolation caused by the pandemic shutdown. On the form they are given, students indicate which of more than 200 potential “problems” trouble them, such as “Other kids tease me,” “My parents dislike my friends” or “A family member is in jail.” Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education . Ivan Lamourt, St. Benedict’s associate headmaster and a certified school psychologist, says that assessing every student this way costs little more than the price of the checklist itself and provides powerful insights into what students are feeling. The assessments are the best way “to collect real-time data of the kids who are in front of us,” he told me; they challenge “us to grow to meet the needs of those kids.” Their motivational mantra: It’s no use trying to reach a student’s mind unless you first tend to their heart. A sign above the doorway into St. Benedict’s Preparatory in Newark, New Jersey. The school has made a conscious decision to focus more on emotional counseling than standardized testing. Credit: Image provided by Anthony DePalma St. Benedict’s Prep, founded in 1868, was a long-time pillar of a poverty-stricken community. As Newark’s racial makeup changed, however, enrollment declined, and in 1972 a majority of the monks voted to shut the school. But a few stood fast, determined to reimagine what a prep school could be. They extended the school year to 11 months, instituted a strict honor code and made brotherhood and empathy priorities. While maintaining high academic standards, they gradually introduced experiential learning, including a mandatory week-long hike on the Appalachian Trail for all freshmen. They also made a conscious decision to focus more on emotional counseling than standardized testing. The school reopened a year later with just 89 students, easy enough for one counselor to handle. Over the decades, it has grown substantially. It now includes elementary and middle school divisions and, since 2020, a girls’ prep school division. Total enrollment is about 1000, and most students in all divisions are Black or Latino. Daily attendance hovers around 95 percent, and just about every graduate goes on to college. Many of the students come from disadvantaged or dysfunctional families. The school now has a counseling center on its property that is staffed by two qualified psychologists, a handful of psychiatrists and licensed school counselors assisted by interns from nearby colleges. Related: The mental health needs of Black and Hispanic girls often go unmet. This group wraps them in support Lamourt and his staff use the intake forms the way administrators use academic evaluations to determine which students need immediate help and which can be kept on a constantly updated watch list. In addition, throughout the year, any student showing signs of emotional distress may be referred to one-on-one therapy or to the unusual group counseling sessions the school offers. These sessions are another way St. Benedict’s gets the most out of its guidance budget. Because it is a private school, students can attend group sessions without prior parental consent. Each weekday features different groups and themes. For example, the “Blue Man Group” discusses depression, “Women of Wisdom” deals with coming-of-age issues for girls and “Unknown Sons” delves into families in which parents are physically or emotionally absent. While the rest of the school attends morning assembly, up to two dozen youths may show up for one of the 30-minute groups in which younger students mix with and learn from upperclassmen, discovering ways to talk about intensely personal issues that city kids — especially boys — rarely discuss outside this kind of setting. One “Unknown Sons” session I attended asked students how they felt being compared to someone else. The responses were deep and emotional, replete with anger, resentment and jealousy. A senior boy took the lead and helped one young man painfully acknowledge that hearing his mother say he’s just like his dad is a real put-down because he knows she hates his father for having walked out on the family. Several other students said they experienced the same thing, and it hurt the way they saw themselves. Administrators and parents in other schools live by the academic metrics that St. Benedict’s downplays, and a fully staffed counseling center like that of St. Benedict’s is beyond most school budgets. But the emotional assessments are not out of reach, and group sessions are efficient, vastly increasing the reach of counseling while also helping to eliminate the stigma attached to it. Guardrails in public school districts would make it difficult, if not impossible, to adopt the St. Benedict’s approach on anything but a limited basis. But tacking an abbreviated emotional checklist onto freshman screening, or experimenting with an “Unknown Sons” group, are feasible options. And I think this small school in a big city shows that any steps that get ahead of emotional issues in teens can result in huge gains. Anthony DePalma, a former education reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of several books, most recently “ On This Ground: Hardship and Hope at the Toughest Prep School in America .” Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org . This story about emotional health intake forms for schools was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter . The post OPINION: Against all odds, a small school in a big city is changing lives by focusing on emotions appeared first on The Hechinger Report .

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